Dario tried to focus on his secretary. “I was unaware that I’d lifted the standing security alert on her. She should be in a jail cell, not polluting my conference room.”
“Yes, well.” Marnie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, but held his gaze with such directness it made her sleek, steel-gray bob shake slightly where the razor edge of it scraped her chin. “She told the security officers downstairs that if they didn’t let her come up she’d hold a press conference on the front steps. I thought this was better.”
Dario made a low noise that was far too close to a growl, but he knew it wasn’t Marnie’s fault. And there were a thousand things he could have done then. He could have turned and left the building. He could have had Anais wait for him all day while he dealt with the piles of actual work he needed to do. He could have had her thrown out, anyway, and damn her threats.
He didn’t do any of those things.
And later, he couldn’t remember leaving the elevator bank at all, but there he was, pushing through the glass doors of the conference room, every atom of his being focused on the slender woman who stood at the windows with a studied insouciance that made his blood boil.
And other parts of him stand up and pay far too close attention.
“The tabloids?” he demanded as he strode inside, and he made no attempt to keep the fury from his voice. “Is there nothing you won’t do? No depth too low for you to sink?”
Anais shrugged, but she didn’t turn from the stretch of windows across the back of the room, with skyscrapers and the distant Manhattan streets spread out before her. As if the great, sprawling city was sunning itself at her feet, the glare of the late-summer sun almost too bright to bear.
“Apparently the tabloids are the only thing that gets your attention. And you have some nerve talking about sinking to new depths, having recently transitioned from corporate shill to kidnapper.”
He ignored that, along with the uncomfortable twinge inside of him that suggested a few headlines wasn’t quite the same thing as flying off with a child, and no matter that he was supposedly the child’s father. “Lying to me in private wasn’t enough for you, so you took your lurid fantasies to the gutter press? I’d almost admire the escalation if it weren’t so calculated.”
“Says the man who seduced me for the sole purpose of abducting my child.” She sniffed, still with her gaze fixed on the city outside the windows, her voice irritatingly smooth and cool, like everything else about her. “You could teach the art of calculation to one of your computers, couldn’t you?”
“Is this a competition?” His voice was not nearly as smooth as it should have been. Dario found that far more irritating than was at all wise.
“You’ve been calling me a liar for years when I told you the truth. I thought I’d live down to your expectations.” She turned then, and she looked even more perfect and untouchable than she usually did, and God help him, but all he could think about was that wide bed in Hawaii and the way she’d sobbed out her pleasure in his arms. Over and over again. “Where is my son?”
“My son. Unless you’re ready to confess, at long last, your tryst with my brother? The anxious world you invited into our personal business awaits the truth.”
Her gaze cooled even further, but she didn’t otherwise react. Not in any way Dario could read, and he hated that. That she could still be a mystery to him and worse—that after all this time and all she’d done he could still want to solve it. What did that say about him?
But he was terribly afraid he knew the answer to that.
“You’re a sperm donor to Damian, nothing more,” she said quietly. Too quietly. “Rather than sort things out the proper way, you opted to become a terrifying stranger who plucked an innocent child off a playground as part of some twisted plot to make himself feel better about an imagined slight. I think your actions speak for themselves, but let’s not kid ourselves. I think we both already knew you’re not a very good man.”
Dario would never know how he managed to keep his temper leashed at that. How he kept his cool on the outside while inside he burned in a white-hot fury that he told himself was entirely rage—because it had to be. Because he refused to allow it be any of those darker things he hated that he could still feel for this woman.
He viewed it as a significant victory that his voice remained relatively calm when he replied to her.
“While you are, at best, a faithless cheater who will say and do anything to avoid responsibility for her own actions. Whether that’s taking a lover while married or neglecting to inform a man that he has a son in the first place. Which glass house do you think will shatter first, Anais? Yours or mine?”
She smiled. Not nicely.
“I came here as a courtesy,” she told him softly. “If you want a war, Dario, I can do that. I don’t really care what you do to me. But you should never have touched my child. We can handle this between us like adults or we can handle it in the papers. Your choice. I have nothing to lose either way.”
“How amusing that you think so.”
“Public opinion tends to back distraught mothers, not the rich, terrible men who abandoned them and their own kids. Maybe you should think about that before you threaten me.”
Dario didn’t know he’d moved, only that he was standing much too close to her, suddenly. He could see the color in her cheeks, the hectic fury that glittered in her eyes. He was aware of the clothes she wore—a sleek shift in a deep aubergine color with a complicated neckline and another pair of extravagant, deceptively delicate-looking shoes, all her thick black hair secured in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck—but more than that, he was aware of her. Every breath she took. Every minute shift of expression on her lovely face. The faint seductive scent she wore, or maybe that was just her skin—
“What the hell are you doing to me?” he growled at her.
“You stole my son, you bastard,” she hissed back at him. “I haven’t even started yet.”
And it hit him then, that she wasn’t playing a game with him now. That the brittle expression behind the fury that he hadn’t been able to read at first wasn’t mysterious at all. It was fear.
Of him. Of what he might do.
He thought he’d never felt so small in all his life. And he couldn’t understand it. Wasn’t this what he’d thought he wanted? This power over her? The upper hand at last? As much his revenge as her just desserts?
“Damian is perfectly fine,” Dario heard himself say grudgingly. From that tiny place inside him that hated what he was doing—hated anything that would put that sort of look on her face, no matter his reasons. “In fact, he’s more than fine. He’s a holy terror.”
Her shoulders relaxed fractionally. Her mouth lost some of its unnatural stiffness. That frozen thing in her dark eyes thawed—if only slightly. And Dario understood that whatever else was true or not about this situation, it was clear Anais truly loved that wild creature of a child. Had he doubted that? Or had he become so used to laying every evil he could at her door that he didn’t know how to do anything else where she was concerned?
The trouble was, he didn’t know how to stop.
“He’s not a holy terror,” Anais corrected him. “Or not entirely, anyway. He’s five.”
“I was under the impression the two are interchangeable.”
She almost smiled. Then she reached toward him as if she meant to touch his arm, yet thought better of it at the last moment. Her hand curled into a fist as she dropped it back to her side, and there was no reason on earth he should feel that as some kind of loss. Or why his forearm should throb as if it hurt where she hadn’t touched him.
“You made your point, Dare,” she said quietly. Her gaze was steady, and she raised her chin as she spoke.